Publish or Perish ( 3 ) – Fraud and ethics Alfred

The famous Dutch writer Gerard van het Reve once said that he was unquestionably a very evil and pestilential person. Not surprisingly, he added, as most human beings have a wicked nature. He believed that half of the depravity was inborn and the other half by human's own choice. Much of what van het Reve wrote was bordering on nonsense written in a brilliant way, but in my darker moments or when reading a newspaper, I sometimes tend to think that his observation is about right. Most people are good but some people are bad, and very few are very bad. History has learned that even the most decent and civilised person can become evil under extreme circumstances. There is no reason to believe that scientists are an exception. I bring this up to discuss an important and sensitive issue: scientific fraud. Several cases have been reported and discussed in the past years in Nature. In order to get an appreciation of the size of the discussion, it is interesting to note that in 1999 Nature published nearly as much on fraud as on soil science. I thought it would be of interest to summarise some of the findings, and then discuss fraud and research ethics in soil science, which has received virtually no attention. This article is not an extensive review on fraud and research ethics but largely a summary of what Nature has published on the subject, supplemented with the opinion and experience of a number of soil science journal editors.